


Birthdays

by MagicMage



Series: Joshua Shepard [11]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Birthday, Birthday Presents, M/M, non-canon Shepard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-21
Updated: 2014-12-21
Packaged: 2018-03-02 15:09:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2816654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagicMage/pseuds/MagicMage
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Joshua Shepard has been avoiding birthdays for as long as Kaidan Alenko has known him. He decides, finally, that he's not going to let him do that any more. In a big way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Birthdays

**Author's Note:**

> This was a request from [mister-vega](http://mister-vega.tumblr.com/) on tumblr for [mshenkoaddict's](http://mshenkoaddict.tumblr.com/) birthday so happy birthday mshenkoaddict!
> 
> Sorry it's my Shepard and not Sheploo, I hope it's okay! I know it's sometimes hard to follow along with these two. (◍•﹏•)

Joshua hated birthdays, Kaidan knew that he hated birthdays. He’d somehow managed to skip every birthday since they’d met, one because he was in jail, another because he was in a coma. He seemed content to pretending the day was any other day, maybe with a bit more cuddling, and definitely with a lot more staring into the distance when he didn’t think Kaidan was looking. Sometimes he worried about what was going through his lover’s head at those moments.

But this birthday, he was going to make it something special. He wasn’t just going to let Joshua dote on him hand and foot on _his_ birthday and then try to ignore his own.

So Kaidan was determined to sneak out of bed and make sure that Joshua didn’t leave until he’d been properly taken care of, and felt like maybe, just maybe, today was more than just another day.

The only problem, Kaidan realised as he attempted to get out of bed without waking Joshua and felt a hand clasp around his wrist, was that Joshua either didn’t sleep, or didn’t sleep very soundly. He turned back to see Joshua looking at him nervously, eyes open and his face awake as if he’d not been asleep at all.

“Where are you going?” Joshua asked him.

He sighed softly, shuffling back onto the bed and turning so he could run his free hand down Joshua’s cheek. “I was going to make breakfast,” he explained softly, watching Joshua’s eyes flutter closed and thinking he was so _damn_ beautiful. He wished that Joshua would see it. It didn’t matter how many years they were together, Joshua would always be beautiful to him.

Joshua rubbed his face, suddenly looking a lot more asleep than he had moments before, and released Kaidan’s arm. Kaidan shifted, placing an arm on either side of his lover and leaning over him, watching as Joshua blinked sleepily and looked up at him.

“Well…what do you want?” Joshua asked, moving up further on the bed like he planned to sit up.

Kaidan interrupted him, leaning in further and planting a gentle kiss to Joshua’s lips, before planting another on his forehead. “You stay here, I’ll make it.”

Joshua groaned. “Why would I do that?” he asked. “I’m already awake.”

Kaidan chuckled. There was no way that Joshua was completely unaware of what this situation was, he was feigning ignorance and Kaidan was stuck between finding it adorable and frustrating. Caught between ‘you _always_ do this’ and ‘two can play at that game’.

“Well you wouldn’t have been awake if you’d just let me get out of bed before, but here we are.” He thumbed at Joshua’s cheek, enjoying how he turned into the touch and looked up at him out of the corner of his eye with so much love and affection that part of him just wanted to tumble right back into bed and stay there with him all day.

He strongly considered it, in fact, but Joshua asked him, “but what if I’m hungry too?” and the game was on.

“I’ll bring it to you,” he told him, his lips quirking up at one side.

“We’re not supposed to eat in bed Kaidan Alenko, it’s messy,” Joshua replied, wrapping his arms around his neck and tugging him closer.

“It’s a special occasion _Joshua Shepard_ ,” he reminded him softly, kissing him gently again. Joshua sighed, and Kaidan felt him grip his chin gently between his thumb and forefinger.

When he pulled away Joshua had a less playful look on his face. “Does it have to be?” he asked softly, shifting up on the bed again.

He was practically sitting up, Kaidan knew he wasn’t going to get him to stay in bed at that point. “I’d really _like_ for it to be Joshua,” he said, trying to implore Joshua with his expression until the man looked away from him and sighed again. “Joshua, you’re _important_ to me, I want this day to be important too.”

Usually he tried really hard not to manipulate Joshua like that, knowing that as soon as he expressed the need or the want for something that Joshua would do anything in his power to give it to him. It had backfired too many times in their years together for him to want to use it anymore, sometimes he said something without realising it and put Joshua through anguish completely by accident.

“I know that I’m important to you Kaidan,” Joshua muttered, looking back at him with an expression of conflict on his face.

Kaidan really didn’t like that expression. Joshua was fighting against what he probably believed as an ingrained habit and wanting to please him, and that was definitely _not_ what this was about. This wasn’t about him, it was about Joshua.

“Okay, I know you know that…just…” He sighed. “I’d really like for this day to mean something to you, without it you wouldn’t be here.”

“One more year that I get to be here longer, while the list of people who aren’t here because of me gets longer…yeah. It means something.” Joshua shook his head, looked away.

Kaidan’s heart sank. “Joshua…”

“Sorry.”

“No…don’t be sorry, just, what about the people who are here because of you? All of them.” Joshua glanced at him, then back at the wall again. He could practically hear the answer, unspoken. Someone else would have stepped up, the world didn’t really need him, it was all an unhappy accident. Someone else could have done it better. The same circular argument that they’d had out loud and silently so many times he couldn’t count anymore. “What about the billions of krogan?” he asked, trying something else, hoping to poke Joshua out of his low mood.

When he saw his lover’s lips quirk upward he felt a bit of relief. “It really is billions of krogan isn’t it?” Joshua asked, shaking his head a bit.

“Yeah, it really is,” Kaidan agreed, brushing some hair out of Joshua’s face. Joshua turned back to him, sighed again. Sometimes he thought he could actually see the guilt and the weight of the galaxy that Joshua carried around on his shoulders. No matter how many times anyone told him he didn’t need to carry it, he couldn’t seem to let go. “If you won’t stay here, will you at least let me cook for you?”

“You usually cook for me,” Joshua told him. He sat up, climbing off of his lover as he also sat up properly.

“If you really have to pretend like today is just another day to get through it, then fine. But I’m cooking breakfast for you, and it does have meaning,” Kaidan said, his frustration seeping into his voice just a bit as he stood up and wandered to their drawers to pull out some pajama pants and a t-shirt. He wasn’t going to get dressed, he planned to spend the entire day at home.

But the silence behind him unnerved him, and he turned around as he finished pulling his pants on to see that Joshua was regarding him cautiously, standing beside his side of the bed and rubbing his hands together.

“I was just joking Kaidan.” Joshua’s tone was just as cautious as his stance and his expression.

Kaidan sighed. “Come here.” He opened his arms, watching as Joshua hesitated for a moment and his lips tugged to the side before he wandered over and let him envelope him in a tight embrace. “I’m not mad,” he told him, squeezing him gently.

“You sounded pretty pissed to me,” Joshua replied, then sighed softly. “I know that it has meaning, I’m just not used to it having meaning. I’m used to it being suddenly two weeks later and someone saying ‘oh wasn’t it your birthday?’ and having to think to remember whether it was or not.”

“I know.” Kaidan himself was actually guilty of that, during the Eden Prime war. “Maybe it’s time for it to mean something though?”

Joshua sighed again, giving in to him again even though it wasn’t actually what he wanted. “Yeah, I guess so.”

So he released his lover, tugged on his shirt and waited until he’d put on some pants of his own and grabbed the extra blanket from the closet so that he could wrap it around himself like a cocoon. Then he led him down the stairs.

After years of living together they’d stopped what had been their ritual in the apartment in New York of Joshua watching him cook. Sometimes Joshua wasn’t there, or he hadn’t been there to cook, or Joshua was putting together a model or something else. Somehow it had just fallen to the wayside. Their New York apartment had also had the dining table basically in the kitchen, where as in their house (because it really was a house even if it was in an apartment building) the dining room was in a separate room with a large old fashioned wooden door separating them.

So, probably out of habit, Joshua moved to go into the living room as they got to the kitchen, and Kaidan tugged him towards the kitchen. “Come here, I want you to watch me cook.”

“You like it when I watch you cook?” Joshua asked, sounding disbelieving.

“Yeah? Of course I do.” Sometimes the things that Joshua missed, for all that he noticed, still shocked him.

Joshua settled in at the other end of the kitchen, against the wall by the door to the dining room, as Kaidan wandered around and grabbed his ingredients and cookware for breakfast. “Then I wonder why I stopped,” Joshua muttered, probably mostly to himself.

After a few moments Kaidan turned to him, looking over him closely. “How’s your hip doing this morning?” he asked, leaving the counter so he could close the distance between them and observe him from up close. Not that it was easy with the blanket draping off of him.

“It’s okay I guess.” Joshua shrugged.

But quick observation told him that Joshua was definitely favouring the other leg. “I’ll get you a chair,” he said, turning to go through the dining room door.

“I can stand by myself you know.” Joshua’s tone was bordering on alarm, and as Kaidan tugged the chair into the room he saw on his face as well.

“Yeah, I know that, but I want you to be comfortable,” he explained, motioning to the chair. Joshua looked at said chair, frowned at it, and shook his head slightly. When Kaidan saw his lip tremble slightly he sighed, leaving the chair so he could go over to Joshua and wrap his arms around his neck. “Hey, don’t do that. Don’t think that a hunk of wood is somehow going to change what I think of you. I want you to be _comfortable_.”

“Yeah but…” Joshua protested, shaking his head. “I can stand. I’m not…”

Kaidan was really glad he hadn’t actually started cooking before he’d gone to get the chair, or he would have probably ended up standing there for too long and would have burnt the food. Apparently dragging Joshua into this wasn’t working.

“I know you’re not,” he muttered, not saying the word because he didn’t want to give it shape. The fact that Joshua thought it hurt too much already. “You used to sit on the chairs in our dining room in New York while I cooked,” he reminded him, holding onto him tightly. He still wasn’t even certain what Joshua was rebelling against, or if Joshua knew.

“Because they were there and you didn’t have to go out of your way to get them for me.” Joshua shook his head again. “You do enough for me on a daily basis, why should you have to do more just because it’s the day I was born.”

Kaidan frowned and leaned back so that he could see Joshua’s face. “Who gave you that idea? Didn’t you see the video Tali sent us last year of her birthday? Garrus barely let her feet touch the ground. It being the day you were born is exactly what I should be doing more.”

“I’ll just start expecting it all the time. I don’t want…I don’t want you to feel like you have to be responsible for me. I can do things on my own.”

He’d heard that argument from him so many times, that he didn’t want to do something because he didn’t want to be an inconvenience or because he’d start wanting more all the time. He’d been using that argument to try and brush off holidays, ceremonies, memorials, for years. At the centre of it was Joshua still afraid he’d push people too far, with what he thought was his own selfishness, and they’d leave. Joshua was selfish sometimes, but he deserved to be selfish. Kaidan had come to that conclusion…he wished Joshua would too.

“Do you expect presents every day because we celebrate Christmas?” Kaidan asked him, trying really hard to keep the frustration out of his tone.

Joshua frowned at him. “Well no, but…”

“I’m not going to think less of you because there’s a chair in our kitchen Joshua,” Kaidan interrupted, turning away so he could go back to cooking. “Sit in it or don’t.”

He wasn’t surprised that Joshua fell silent after that, as he moved around the kitchen and threw together their breakfast. He’d gone back to trying to dodge arguments a few years after the Reaper War had ended and everything had been ‘fine’. Joshua now had a habit of putting up a slight fight and then about facing all at once, or just dropping the subject, when Kaidan appeared to have the upper hand. Kaidan hadn’t been able to coax Joshua into a real argument for quite some time.

It was his own fault, he knew that, but he still missed Joshua’s willingness give him information from those weeks in the New York apartment sometimes.

He was surprised when he turned around from putting their meal into the oven and Joshua had actually sat down. He didn’t know when he’d done so, but he was watching him with a slightly sad look on his face.

Kaidan sighed internally. He was doing a really shit job of making this day work.

His birthday? Joshua doted on him, sometimes he found presents he’d meant to give him, but second guessed and hidden away, months later on top of the fridge or in the highest crooks of cupboards. Joshua took him places, or made the entire day about him from the second he opened his eyes in the morning to the moment he went to sleep that night. Friends came, they had parties. Every one of his birthdays since the Reaper War had been memorable.

He couldn’t even coax Joshua into having a few of their friends come to their house. Why should anyone come all the way to Earth for one day? Sometimes he was a hypocritical ass, but pointing it out never seemed to work.

Kaidan approached Joshua, who watched him as he got closer, and ran a hand over his blanket covered shoulder. “I have a present for you, you know,” he told him, thinking now wasn’t the right time to give it but knowing Joshua would need warning.

“It’s okay, you don’t have to…” was exactly the reaction he expected.

“You spend _thousands_ of credits on me every holiday that you can,” Kaidan told him, keeping his tone neutral, just reminding him. The fact that Joshua didn’t realise that refusing a present he’d already bought him was more of an inconvenience than actually giving the present wasn’t lost on him.

“Yeah, but I don’t do it because I expect it returned.” Joshua pressed his lips together, resting a hand over Kaidan’s on his shoulder.

Kaidan sighed. “Can I _please_ do something in return?”

“I…” He watched as the protest was wiped from Joshua’s face. “I guess so…I just…what do you want me to do?”

Mission parameters. Always needing orders in order to know what to do, because he was so afraid of stepping on toes.

“Let me,” Kaidan told him softly. He knelt down, taking hold of Joshua’s hands and looking up at him. “I know that it scares you, and I _know_ you haven’t had the best birthdays ever, but even if we never work this up to being a party, with your friends who _do_ want to celebrate this day with you as well, let me celebrate you. Just a little bit.”

Joshua swallowed, Kaidan saw his Adam’s apple bob. “Yeah, but…what do _I_ do?”

“Eat the food I make, cuddle with me, accept my gift, and then do anything else you want to do,” Kaidan explained, feeling Joshua’s hands twitch a little in his.

“But I do most of that on a daily basis.”

“Yup.”

“That’s…not so hard I guess.”

Kaidan felt affection bloom in his chest, seeing the slight confusion, but also the want to comply on his lover’s face. “I hope not.”

He didn’t want the day to be all about him, but if the only way to get Joshua to accept that it was a good day was to make Joshua think it was about him then fine.

“What’s the present?” Joshua asked him, after a moment of silence and Joshua glancing around the room nervously.

“It’s a secret, I’ll tell you later.”

The frown that Joshua gave him was adorable, so close to a pout he could have suddenly been a young boy being denied his birthday present instead of a hesitant thirty-odd-year-old man. “But I want to know now,” he whined, completing the illusion. Kaidan chuckled, rising to his feet and giving Joshua a soft kiss on the lips.

Sometimes he forgot that sitting down and laying out parameters was the best way to get Joshua to cooperate, he was surprised he still managed to forget after so many years. He still expected him to just react to situations, when he’d spent most of his life being taught not to react.

“Just sit there while I finish breakfast,” Kaidan replied, completely ignoring Joshua’s whining.

-o-

When they sat down to breakfast Joshua started looking at him oddly. Kaidan frowned at him from across the table, nudging him in the shin with his foot. “What?” he asked, confused about what the face was about.

“Hot chocolate and breakfast casserole don’t really…go together, do they?” Joshua asked, looking at the plate and mug before him and tilting his head.

“It doesn’t matter, those are your favourites right?”

“Does that mean I’m getting hot chocolate with every meal today?” Joshua’s lips quirked up, and he looked at him with a mock innocence that would have fooled anyone else. Kaidan was being made fun of, but it was okay. At least Joshua was smiling again.

“We drink whiskey before…’bed’ on all of my birthdays, and you always supply the kitchen with Canadian lager for the entire day so why not hot chocolate?”

Joshua turned a bit red. “Well…the whiskey that’s because...you brought whiskey up before Cerberus and… You wanted Canadian lager at Apollo’s, but we couldn’t find it.”

“So we’re having breakfast casserole for breakfast, because you told me it was your favourite, and you can have as much hot chocolate as you want because you always tried to offer to share some with me on the SR-1 and I always turned you down,” Kaidan told him, a smile growing on to his face as Joshua got that cute little ‘I’m thinking too hard and it hurts’ look on his face.

“So…what are we having for lunch and dinner?”

“We’re having whatever the hell you want for lunch, and we’re having steak for dinner.” He wasn’t sure if Joshua had started playing twenty questions because he was trying to plan out the day in his head, or if he was actually curious.

Joshua looked up at him from underneath his eyelashes and smiled bashfully. “Steak.”

“Hmm,” Kaidan agreed, knowing Joshua had made the exact same connection to their first night on the Citadel that he had when planning everything out.

Then he watched, with more nerves than were probably required, as Joshua took his first bite of his breakfast. It had only taken them about three times as long to get to this point as he’d first planned, what with Joshua dragging his feet and himself forgetting how to get Joshua to stop dragging his feet.

“This is…” He watched as Joshua shook his head, put his fork down and frowned at the plate. Kaidan felt his nerves spike, he couldn’t tell from the expression what Joshua was thinking.

“I uhm…” The look Joshua gave him as he started speaking was so full of question he had to pause and clear his throat. “I had Liara go through the list of more popular cookbook recipes in the area you lived in on Mindoir and…”

Joshua looked like he was going to cry. “Why?”

Kaidan stood up, figuring that putting himself on the opposite side of the table hadn’t been as good of an idea as he’d thought. He rounded the table and came to a stop at Joshua’s side, Joshua had followed him with his eyes all the way around the table.

“Because I figured the last time you’d actually had a good birthday was before the attack on Mindoir.” He ran his hand through the hair at the back of Joshua’s neck, watching him as he looked down at his plate again, and then leaned against his stomach heavily. “Bad idea?”

“No.”

For a few minutes he wondered if Joshua hadn’t just lied to him, as they sat there in silence and Joshua leaned against him. Birthdays were really supposed to be happy times, but in Joshua’s case there’d been quite a bit of unhappiness as well. Having known the reason for this particular favourite food he’d wanted it to be a bit more special than his usual substitution for the recipe of just putting scrambled eggs with bacon on toast.

But then Joshua spoke. “The attacks on Mindoir happened…pretty close to my twelfth birthday.” Kaidan had known that, but he’d wondered whether they actually had any correlation. “Group homes, there’s like twenty kids under one roof. You don’t do Christmas and birthdays when there’s hardly enough money to feed and clothe everyone. Mercs? They don’t give a shit when you’re born, as long as you can shoot a gun and do as you’re told. It just stopped seeming like there was a point. The Alliance doesn’t pull out a cake for you, they want you to be able to shoot and do as you’re told as much as the mercs do. I started figuring on New Year’s, oh well here we go I must be a year older now, without really…bothering to pay attention when my birthday had come and gone.”

Kaidan started running his fingers through Joshua’s hair again. “Eventually you just sort of stopped caring.”

“No, eventually I started reaching April eleventh every year and thinking, oh there goes another year of me killing x-number of people,” Joshua corrected him, shaking his head. “Didn’t occur to me that anyone even considered it a good day.”

“I love you,” Kaidan told him gently, watching as Joshua looked up at him. He was surprised that he was smiling.

“I love you too.” He turned back to the plate. “My mom used to make this huge fuss on my birthday. She’d buy too many presents and make a way too big cake. If I started trying to go back to work in the field she’d yell and say it was my ‘special day’ and I wasn’t allowed to do anything. Every kid, even kids I didn’t know that well, somehow all showed up to parties. It was…special.”

Kaidan dared chuckle and muttered, “It sounds like you inherited her enthusiasm for other people’s birthdays.”

Joshua managed to chuckle back at him. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“Can I make it special too?” He wasn’t sure what he’d do it Joshua denied him, but part of him understood. Every fibre of his being probably still held on to those days, after so many of nothing. He’d been lucky enough to have doting, loving parents.

“Yeah,” Joshua told him, his voice slightly hoarse.

There was another long moment of silence as Kaidan let sink in that Joshua hadn’t denied him, had in fact just given him permission to do exactly what he wanted.

“I’m going to move my plate over here, okay?” he asked, already going to get his plate and mug.

Joshua didn’t protest, just reached for his hand when he sat down adjacent to him and squeezed. “Thank you Kaidan,” he said earnestly. “I’m an ass sometimes, and I’m lucky you’re as stubborn as I am or…” He chuckled and shook his head. “Yeah, thanks.”

“Eat,” Kaidan instructed gently, watching as Joshua picked up his fork with his free hand, still holding his tightly, and started eating again.

“You eat,” Joshua told him after a moment. “You don’t have enough food on your plate Mr. Biotic.”

Kaidan smiled and relented, he would have been content to just watch Joshua eat and have that be it. “Alright, and I’ll get seconds.”

“Damn right you will.”

-o-

Joshua had been pawing him for hours, trying to wheedle out of him what the present was. He’d almost given in a few times, after a rather…convincing blowjob earlier that had left him almost been unable to return the favour.

The fact that he was still on the receiving end of sexual favours even on Joshua’s birthday had thrown him for a bit of a loop, but that just seemed to be how his lover was at the end of the day.

Speaking of the end of the day.

Plates sat on the table in front of the simulated fire in their living room, empty save for the last of the steak juices, with and empty beer bottle each beside them. Joshua was cuddled up against his shoulder, and Kaidan was almost certain he was falling asleep. He had his arm around his lover’s waist and had, at some point, tugged him halfway onto his lap with Joshua’s legs draped over his lap.

“Are you waiting until midnight?” Joshua whined.

Okay, not falling asleep. Which was probably good, it was a good thing right? Crap, his nerves were starting to settle in again. Somehow everything had gone right from breakfast, with only a hiccup halfway through the day when Joshua had turned on the TV and seen a news story about complete strangers celebrating his birthday. Nothing like a major invasion of privacy to ruin the moment. Quiet news day? Report on Commander Shepard.

Yeah, not good.

But now? He felt the comfortable weight of his lover snuggling against him, and the contentment of having had a good meal. As well as the nerves currently cutting out a pattern in his stomach. Maybe today wasn’t right after all, maybe he should wait. He could definitely play out the present as having been something else…

“Kaidan?” Joshua asked, turning to look at him anxiously. “What’s wrong?”

No, he couldn’t do that because Joshua was too observant.

He shifted so that he could run his fingers along the hairline at his temples. He’d gone a bit grey there over the past few years, not that he was one to talk, but it spoke for how _late_ they did _everything_. No. Even if today wasn’t perfect, he wanted this more than everything.

“Nothing’s wrong Joshua, it’s all good.” Joshua clearly didn’t believe him, just narrowing his eyes at him a bit and then turning back to stare at the fire for a moment. “I have to go get something though, I’ll be right back.”

That seemed really awkward, and Joshua clearly thought he’d probably done something wrong because as Kaidan detangled from him he felt him grab his wrist for a moment before letting go.

_Good job Kaidan, be as awkward as possible and scare your highly excitable boyfriend into thinking he’s done something wrong._

He’d hid it, the present, somewhere he knew that Joshua wouldn’t look. The fish food drawer under their fish tank. Even with the VI in the tank feeding the fish Kaidan still had to be the one to remember to refill the food dispenser which the VI used. Joshua never thought of it, as much as he loved watching the fish he never remembered to feed them. He probably never would.

He stuffed it in the pocket of his pajama pants, and wondered if he should suddenly dawn a suit. Joshua would think that was weird. He was still staring after him nervously when he returned to the living room anyways, so probably going all the way upstairs to get a suit would have been a bad idea.

“Are you okay?” Joshua asked him as he went down the steps towards the couch again.

“I’m fine Joshua, don’t worry, okay?” He was probably the one who should do the worrying. Not that he fathomed that Joshua could possibly reject it, but… There was always a possibility.

“You went really quiet and then you ran out of here like I had turned into a husk Kaidan.”

“I’m back now.”

“I’m not a husk Kaidan.”

“I know.”

Joshua sat up straighter on the couch, looking up at him in confusion with a frown on his face. Kaidan stood over him, unable to decide if he should kneel down or sit beside him or…what. He still had his hand in his pajama pocket, gripping the little black box he’d hid in the fish tank drawer weeks ago.

“Did I do something wrong?” Joshua asked, tilting his head slightly with a look that said ‘I’m about to panic’ on his face.

“No, you didn’t do anything wrong, at all,” Kaidan told him, sitting beside him on the couch and pulling the box out of his pocket as he did so. “I just…” He could say some really affectionate loving things, or properly reassure his worrying lover, or anything, but instead he just held out the box. “Here.”

Joshua took the box and looked down at it, holding it in his palms with his hands cupped. “It’s…a box.”

There was no way Joshua was that dense. He could see from the way his shoulders had squared, and the way his posture had gone ridged, that he knew exactly what the box was. But Kaidan could play along.

“Yup.”

Joshua’s hands started shaking, not the awful tremor he got when his PTSD had been triggered, just shaking. Kaidan watched him, feeling like everything was held in the balance of Joshua sitting there, the box in his hands, the way his eyes were focusing so incredibly on it. Then, then he opened it.

“Th-That’s a…really nice ring Kaidan.” Kaidan, whose attention had gone to the movement of Joshua’s hands, was brought back to Joshua’s face when he heard the waver in his voice, the way his voice cracked completely when he said his name.

“Do you…like it?” Kaidan asked, it was not the right selection of words, but Joshua took the ring from the box between his fingers in one hand, covered his face with the other, and nodded.

“Yeah…” Joshua’s voice cracked again, but he couldn’t see Joshua’s face now because he was covering it.

Kaidan swallowed, wondering when his throat had tightened, almost as tight as his chest. He thought if he had a heart attack right now he’d really ruin the moment, but he still had the right selection of words to say. “Will you marry me?”

And then Joshua sobbed, and Kaidan felt momentary panic, until he had an entire Joshua Shepard in his lap at once, arms thrown around his shoulders, head pressed against his as he tucked his chin against his neck.

“I love you.” Joshua sobbed.

Kaidan wrapped his arms around Joshua’s waist, tugging him closer on his lap and feeling a tear soak into the neck of his shirt. He could feel tears collecting in his eyes too. They’d come so far, they still had so far to go, but he’d never had any doubt that Joshua had loved him and would continue to do so. “I love you too…is that a—“

“Yes. Yes, it’s a…” His lover sniffled, pulled back so that he could see Kaidan and Kaidan could see him. He’d never thought that Joshua’s crying face was more beautiful than then. He watched as Joshua showed him his hand, he’d managed to get the ring on at some point. He watched as he swallowed thickly, and a fresh set of tears ran down his cheeks. “How come you always beat me to it?”

“Because you always wait for me?” Kaidan guessed, and now he was crying too.

“It’s perfect,” Joshua muttered, looking down at the band on his finger in reverence.

“Take if off for a second.” Joshua gave him a look like he’d grown a second head, but did as he was told. Kaidan gently took the ring from him and held it just so, showing him the engraving on the inside of the band.

_Sanity Check_

Joshua sobbed again, a smile on his face as he shook his head. Kaidan handed him the ring back and felt his heart swell as he put it back on. “What’d you call it, a… s-sanity check?”

“Hmm…yeah.” He sniffed, tugging his _fiancé_ into a tight embrace. “Sanity check.”


End file.
